January 16, 2008 AT 11:23 am

Makin’ more room for your Boarduino hacking

I’ve got some comments that the Boarduino kit is too wide and thus crowds out space on a breadboard…
Here’s an example of how to use 2 halfsized breadboards to make a nice workspace.

First, get 2 halfsized breadboards (this will work with fullsized ones too, of course, but itll be huge!)

Slice the backing of one of the power rails and pull it off

[flickr 2194572512 ]

Snap together the two pieces

[flickr 2194572384 ]

Plug in your boarduino, now you have tons of workspace!

[flickr 2194572092 ]

You can peel off the backing and stick the breadboards (and extra rail) onto a piece of cardboard (or anything really) to give it more support.

[flickr 2194572240 ]

Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, or even use Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for MakeCode, CircuitPython, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.

1 Comment

Parallax (www.parallax.com) is selling breadboards that have 6 (yes 6)
contacts on each side of the center gutter instead of the usual 5. I
just discovered this – I don’t think I’ve ever seen one with anything
other than 5. This provides more working area on either side while
still following the more traditional location for the chip/boarduino.

I like these boards, but they don’t work with things like power supplies
that plug directly into the power rails on either side (since the rails
are farther apart).

Another nice thing about them, in addition to the 6
contacts, is that the power rail contacts line up directly with those in
the main breadboard – they are not shifted the way they seem to be in
most breadboards these days. Of course, to make up for that they put a
gap in the middle and split the positive (red) strip in half. This
makes it easier to use multiple supply voltages, but you lose more
contacts bridging the two halves when you’ve only got one supply.